Matthew 6:27 Commentary and Bible Study

Our translators have assumed that this is about our height and that is one possible way the verse can be translated. ‘Which of you by taking thought’ – by consuming care and deep anxiety – ‘can add’ eighteen or fifteen inches, whatever a cubit was, to his height? That is actually quite a lot to add to your height. It is a bit strange because it is an enormous amount, and there is an equally venerable translation which takes the Greek not in terms of your height, but in terms of the length of your days, your lifespan, treating cubit figuratively: ‘Which of you by all-consuming care can add one hour to your lifespan?’ The word translated ‘stature’ can mean ‘age’, ‘years’ (Luke 2:52), ‘of age’, ‘maturity’, ‘adulthood’ (John 9:21; Ephesians 4:13), ‘age’ in the sense of the adult time when a woman is able to conceive (Hebrews 11:11), or more concretely, ‘height’ or ‘size’ (Luke 19:3). The Greek can have all these meanings and so the context must decide the correct translation. The structure of the argument requires an example of a small feat not a large feat, yet one which, even so, is beyond the power of men. The sense is then: if you cannot even do this, how can you think of doing that, or as Luke expresses it in his parallel passage, ‘If you then are not able to do the least, why are you anxious for the rest?’ (Luke 12:26).This verse contains a further argument which makes the same point. God’s people should not be anxious about material things, not only because they have a loving heavenly Father who cares for them better than they can care for themselves, but also because their ability to make any real difference to their own lives or circumstances is so limited. But someone says, of course it makes a difference whether or not I take thought for my life. If I am sick and I call a doctor, he will treat my condition and I may well recover. If I had done nothing, I would have got worse and possibly died. Am I not extending my life by taking action to protect it? Yes, you are, but not beyond the time God has allotted to you. No amount of anxiety is going to change God’s eternal plan and causes an outcome that he had not envisaged. Why is that the measure of what anxiety must do if it is to be considered to have any power? Because in any other scenario, it has contributed nothing. Though God has appointed means to protect our own lives, anxiety is not to be one of them. Anxiety is the opposite of faith. Faith must be exercised even when we have done all that we can to support our own lives, for we can never do enough to make the outcome certain; always we are in the hands of the Lord; always we must say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that’ (James 4:15). You may live longer than you would have lived, but you will not live longer than God has determined. The future is not unknown to God, but is fixed, in spite of means that we might use to change it. Saul was terrified at Samuel’s posthumous prophecy that he would die the following day (1 Samuel 28:19-20), and yet it was by his own hand that his life was finally extinguished (1 Samuel 31:4).